29th August 2023
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Four members of the Texas National Guard are being disciplined, and their unit is being disbanded, after whistleblowers alleged they were using the WhatsApp communications platform to infiltrate and monitor illegal migrant and smuggler groups in violation of the organization’s rules against spying operations, according to a joint report by the Texas Tribune and Military Times.
According to the report, six military intelligence officials assigned to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star National Guard deployment at the border turned over the names of four officers who were using WhatsApp to join migrant and smuggler chat groups to solicit assistance in investigating “targets” the unit identified to federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security during a February 2022 meeting.
No good deed goes unpunished.
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29th August 2023
Roll Call.
The House Appropriations Committee could consider amendments to the fiscal 2024 Commerce-Justice-Science bill next month stripping federal funding from prosecutors who are pursuing charges against former President Donald Trump.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., a member of the House Freedom Caucus who also sits on the Appropriations Committee, announced Monday that he is working on two amendments to offer when the panel takes up the bill in early September.
The Commerce-Justice-Science and Labor-HHS-Education measures are the last two appropriations bills for next year that the full committee has not yet considered; no official schedule for September has been released.
Clyde said he plans to introduce an amendment to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to prosecute any major presidential candidate prior to the upcoming presidential election, and a second that would prohibit funding for state prosecutions.
“Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars have no place funding the radical Left’s nefarious election interference efforts,” Clyde said in a statement.
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29th August 2023
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People who are actual professionals are accountable through licensing or malpractice liability. Physicians, architects, dentists, and civil engineers, for example, are accountable for the quality and fitness of the services they deliver. Plumbers, electricians, auto service techs, and roofers are all subject to implied or express warranties and bond requirements.
In stark contrast, the entirety of federal policy and law enforcement is now the product of increasingly unaccountable people. The operant theory, that elected officials controlling funding and appointments will provide accountability and protect the public interest, is no longer the reality. Civil service protection, the cult of experts, the replacement of shared ethical values with partisanship, and the sheer size of the Leviathan has created a new reality.
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29th August 2023
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Five months since the epic failure of Silicon Valley Bank – due to “a significant supervisory failure,” according to Dan Tarullo, a former Fed governor who oversaw financial regulation and supervision at the board – the man responsible for that ‘oversight’ at the San Francisco Fed is ‘retiring’.
Azher Abbasi will retire from his role as the head of supervision and credit at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco effective Oct. 31, according to an email from the bank’s spokesperson.
Welcome to the Deep State: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.
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28th August 2023
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28th August 2023
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Did you know that there is a federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)? But of course there is. And you might suppose that since pipelines carry mostly oil and natural gas, it would be housed inside the Department of Energy. But no: it is part of the Department of Transportation. So we have yet another instance of government cabinet department that does nothing to produce an increased supply of the thing it was created for (energy, but see also: education), while a department that is widely failing in its primary responsibility (transportation) has jurisdiction over oil and gas pipelines.
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27th August 2023
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26th August 2023
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25th August 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
America’s public schools are almost unbelievably bad, to a degree that poses an existential threat to the republic. That’s the bad news. The good news is that most Americans are figuring it out. Rasmussen finds that a 36% plurality say that our public schools are poor. That is a remarkable finding. A sadly misinformed 9% think our schools are excellent. But that disproportion is revealing. The teachers’ unions aren’t fooling many people anymore.
Minnesota exemplifies the awful performance of our schools as well as any state; perhaps better than most, since at one time Minnesota’s schools had the reputation of being above average. Now they are terrible: 64% of Minnesota’s 11th graders can’t do math at grade level. Nevertheless, they are all going to graduate. Good luck competing with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, German, and other kids from across the world.
The latest test scores have come out in our state, and my colleague Catrin Wigfall explains at AmericanExperiment.org: “Majority of Minnesota students aren’t meeting reading and math standards.”
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24th August 2023
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24th August 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
No former Democratic Party office-holder ever goes hungry. Democrats are great at finding jobs for politicians that don’t quite work out. A case in point is Minnesota’s Melisa López Franzen.
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23rd August 2023
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22nd August 2023
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22nd August 2023
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My selections are doing worse than usual in Biden Bingo. How are yours doing?
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21st August 2023
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20th August 2023
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19th August 2023
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19th August 2023
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19th August 2023
NewsMax.
The spike in migration was made possible by the discovery this year of a new route through Nicaragua, where relaxed entry requirements allow Mauritanians and a handful of other foreign nationals to purchase a low-cost visa without proof of onward travel.
As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia, and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.
And, of course, once they’re here, they’re here to stay.
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17th August 2023
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17th August 2023
The Antiplanner.
Washington state Democrats believe that a Portland-Seattle-Vancouver high-speed rail line is vital to the future of the Northwest. It is so vital, in fact, that they want someone else to pay for it, namely the federal government. The federal government, after all, seems to be unique in the world in that it can spend unlimited amounts of money without raising taxes to cover those costs.
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16th August 2023
John Stossel.
It’s August, when many young people head off to college.
This year, fortunately, fewer will go.
I say “fortunately” because college is now an overpriced scam.
Overpriced, because normal incentives to be frugal and make smart judgments about who should go to college were thrown out when the federal government took over granting student loans.
Why?
Because our government basically vomits money at everyone who applies.
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15th August 2023
John Hinderaker at Power Line.
The Georgia indictment relates to his (and 18 other defendants’) post-election efforts to reverse the apparent result of the 2020 election, in Georgia and elsewhere. That Trump made such attempts is not disputed. The question is, what did he do that was illegal?
The indictment alleges a vast conspiracy, supported by 161 “overt acts,” that ultimately comprises Count I, a violation of Georgia’s RICO statute. The problem is that, with two exceptions, the “overt acts” are all legal. You can’t aggregate a series of legal acts and make them a crime by calling them a conspiracy.
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15th August 2023
The Antiplanner.
First, planners identify a solution they want to implement. It might be light rail or high-speed rail, it might be urban densification, or it might be something like complete streets or vision zero.
Second, planners cast around for problems that they think they might be able to persuade people their proposal will solve. These can include childhood obesity, global warming, traffic congestion, or housing affordability.
Third, they use public involvement techniques designed to generate support for their plans. One such technique is the charente, a meeting in which planners strictly control the agenda to make sure that people only consider questions the planners want to answer. At the charities, planners might ask, “Do you want more congestion or less?” or “Do you want higher housing costs or lower?” Since they assume their proposals will reduce congestion or housing costs, if you answer less congestion or lower housing costs, they will claim that you support their plans.
Another technique is a survey with a limited number of questions. The San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Commission wants to increase taxes to subsidize transit, so it is asking residents to fill out a survey. The survey never asks if people want to pay more taxes; instead the higher tax is a given. Instead, it asks how people want to spend the money. There are five possible answers: transit, transit, bike lanes, transit, and transit.
Actually, this is a good description of any Democrat-dominated political regime devoted to increasing government power and government employee paychecks.
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14th August 2023
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14th August 2023
The Antiplanner.
At the latest count, 93 people died in the Maui fire that also burned most of the town of Lahaina. The blame for this fire can be traced directly to Hawaii’s 62-year-old land-use law, which was written to protect Hawaii’s agricultural industry but had the opposite result.
The land-use law divided the state into urban and rural zones and heavily restricted development of the rural areas. As the state’s population grew, Maui’s median home prices rose from about 3 times median family incomes in 1969 to 7.9 times median family incomes in 2021. Any prices above 5 times median incomes are unaffordable since banks won’t approve a mortgage for a home that costs that much more than a family’s income.
The stated goal of the land-use law was to protect Hawaii’s agricultural industry from urban sprawl. But high housing prices made it impossible for Hawaiian farmers to hire the help they needed as people earning farmworker pay couldn’t afford to live in Hawaii. As a result, most Hawaiian farms went out of business. Between 1982 and 2017, according to USDA’s 2017 Natural Resources Inventory, the number of acres in Hawaiian crop production declined by 72 percent as sugar cane, pineapple, and other crops moved to other tropical countries that didn’t have self-inflicted housing crises.
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13th August 2023
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13th August 2023
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13th August 2023
Steve Sailer.
I haven’t been to the Nancy Pelosi building, but I’ve been to Mayne’s CalTrans building in downtown Los Angeles, and it radiates a palpable hatred toward the bureaucrats and visitors who must come into contact with it. Genius is said to be an infinite capacity for taking pains, but Mayne is a peculiar kind of genius, once with an infinite capacity for inflicting psychic pains on the public forced to deal with his buildings.
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13th August 2023
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The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly.
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11th August 2023
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10th August 2023
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9th August 2023
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7th August 2023
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6th August 2023
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6th August 2023
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4th August 2023
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4th August 2023
The Foundry.
Rising interest rates and a shortage of lower-cost houses under the Biden administration continue to make homeownership unobtainable for many young families. Instead of working to solve actual problems like these, President Joe Biden is once again choosing to prioritize the expansive promotion of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology in housing policies, as a recent proposed rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows.
The proposed regulation would encourage taxpayer-funded housing agencies to abandon the goal of ensuring fairness in the housing market and instead pursue the elimination of all inequality in housing and income.
Under the rule, program participants—entities like public housing agencies, grant recipients, private entities that supply public or subsidized housing, and other entities receiving HUD funds—must supply an “Equity Plan” to HUD, describing the steps they have taken to “eliminate disparities in housing-related opportunities.”
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1st August 2023
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31st July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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The United States is in big trouble militarily. That’s the upshot of a new RAND publication called “Inflection Point”:
[I]t has become increasingly clear that the U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally greatly exceed the means that have become available to accomplish those tasks. Reversing this erosion will call for sustained, coordinated efforts by the United States, its allies, and its key partners[.]
Basically, the report says that the U.S. military’s technological superiority has mostly eroded, and to address that, we need to shift from projecting power to defending against attacks by other powers (i.e. China). RAND then gives a large number of concrete recommendations on how to change the U.S. military in order to do that. But transforming the military costs a lot of money; even if we don’t end up with a bigger military after the shift, getting from here to there will involve a lot of research, design, testing, and equipment purchasing.
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29th July 2023
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27th July 2023
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26th July 2023
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